Happy half-birthday to Life Story Magic!
Time has flown by, and our little startup turned six months old this week.
To celebrate — and also because Father’s Day is a week from Sunday and Life Story Magic is a fantastic gift (and maybe an even better last-minute gift, hint, hint) — I have a quick update and a special offer code.
If you’re not familiar with Life Story Magic, the idea is simple: a professional interviewer does a remote video interview with a parent, grandparent, or other loved one (or with you—lots of people are using it to help record their own stories). You get the full recorded video and transcript, usually within 24 hours.
I’m grateful to some of our first customers who have given me testimonials and permission to share short samples from their interviews.
Like this one, in which a client I really enjoyed interviewing described what it was like for his family to leave the Midwest for California during the Great Depression.
(If you can’t see the video, you probably do not have images enabled!)
Most interviews run 90 to 120 minutes, so there's time to go deep.
This is just one example. You can find more interview excerpts on our new website, and I’ll be sharing a few more in the newsletter over the next several days.
Seriously: Do you have stories like that that kids, grandkids, or the world at large should know? If you’re fortunate enough to have older loved ones, do they have stories like this to tell?
To celebrate, I’m offering a Life Story Magic Anniversary/Father’s Day special for the first 25 customers who use code 6MONTHS at checkout.
You can purchase now and schedule the interview whenever it’s convenient.
Hope to help preserve your story—or a loved one's—soon.
On the other hand ...
When I was in sixth grade, I used to twist myself in knots with a hypothetical:
Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy?
The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain.
Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument:
What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with?
Didn’t that potentially be its own kind of happiness after all?
I was 11. Welcome to my world.
All these years later, a new study suggests it might not have been a pure hypothetical.
The evolution of worry
In a study published in the Science Bulletin, researchers were trying to solve a puzzle in personality psychology: neuroticism — the tendency toward worry, anxiety, and negative emotion — is consistently associated with worse health outcomes. More mental disorders, more chronic disease, higher mortality.
Yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, a species that didn’t worry would have died out long ago.
Worry is what keeps you from stepping in front of a bus.
So why does something that evolved to help us survive seem to kill us faster?
The answer, the researchers found, is that neuroticism isn’t really one thing. It’s two.
Two kinds of worry
Using a method that maps personality traits across a large population — drawing on health records, brain imaging, genome-wide data, and behavioral surveys covering many thousands of people from the UK Biobank — they identified two distinct dimensions running through neuroticism that work separately.
The first is what most people think of when they hear the word: general emotional distress. Mood instability, feelings of helplessness, and depression.
This dimension is associated with higher rates of mental illness and worse overall well-being.
No surprise there.
The second dimension is what the researchers call ERIS — Emotional Reactivity and Internal Stability.
At one end sit people prone to worry and anxiety. At the other end sit people prone to a kind of simmering fed-up-ness and mood swings.
High-ERIS individuals — the worriers — live significantly longer than people low in neuroticism overall because of what worry tends to make people do.
They go to the doctor more, avoid risky behaviors, and pay attention to diet.
This tracks with research I wrote about recently. Married people appear to have lower cancer rates, in part because spouses tend to notice when something is off and push their partners toward care they might otherwise skip.
So, anxiety works as a low-grade alert system that keeps people from ignoring things they probably shouldn’t ignore.
“Moderately worrying while maintaining emotional stability may indeed be nature’s gift for longevity,” the researchers wrote.
The ancient wisdom version
The study opens with an old Chinese proverb:
“Life springs from sorrow and calamity; death comes from ease and pleasure.”
Which is sort of what I was thinking in sixth grade.
A few caveats: this study is correlational, not a controlled experiment. Also, neuroticism at the clinical level — severe anxiety, chronic rumination — is still associated with worse outcomes.
Also, this research isn’t a license to catastrophize. The point is between productive, risk-aware anxiety and destabilizing emotional chaos. One appears to add years. The other doesn’t.
So, my childhood hypothetical turns out to be harder than it looked.
It’s not a simple trade of years for happiness, but two forces pulling in different directions, and you may not get to choose which one you’re wired for.
My sixth-grade self would have found that deeply unsettling.
But on the other hand …
Other things worth knowing …
AP: Trump threatened more strikes on Iran Wednesday as back-and-forth attacks continued to threaten the still-fragile truce. The U.S. military also fired on a tanker trying to transport oil out of Iran, the latest escalation since Tuesday’s retaliatory strikes over the downed helicopter. Iran’s armed forces warned that any repeat of “aggression against the Islamic Republic” would result in “more severe and widespread attacks.”
CNBC: Inflation hit a three-year high in May, with the Consumer Price Index rising 4.2% year over year — the third consecutive monthly increase — driven almost entirely by the Iran war’s impact on energy prices. Gasoline is up 40.5% from a year ago. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.7% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in more than three years. Markets now expect no Federal Reserve rate cuts at all in 2026.
CBS News: The Social Security Trustees’ annual report released Tuesday confirms the program’s main retirement fund is on track to run dry by the end of 2032 — at which point benefits would be automatically cut by 22%, reducing the average retiree’s monthly check by roughly $500. The report moved the insolvency date up three months from last year’s projection, partly because the Big Beautiful Bill reduced tax revenues flowing into the program.
MSNBC: House Speaker Mike Johnson told a Louisiana radio station Monday that Republicans have a plan to "adjust and fix" Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — but won't unveil it until 2027, after the midterms.
Fox Sports: The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off tomorrow, June 11, with Mexico vs. South Africa at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City — a repeat of the opening match of the 2010 tournament. The U.S. plays its opener against Paraguay on Friday night in Los Angeles. The 48-team, 104-game tournament runs through the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.
AP: The two crew members of the Army Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz were rescued by a Navy sea drone — the first time in U.S. military history an unmanned surface vessel has rescued personnel.
ScienceDaily: Researchers have confirmed that Stonehenge's six-ton Altar Stone was deliberately transported by Neolithic humans from northeast Scotland — roughly 700 kilometers away — making it the longest known stone transport of any prehistoric monument.
Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
And we see the beginning of the lawyer's mind in young Bill, age 11! We're all glad you chose journalism though!